Introduce Yourself

Hey there! I'm Robin Kara, living in southern Augsburg with a nice view on my garden. After work I love tinkering, discussing, hanging out
and having some beers with other tech-enthusiasts and makers at the OpenLab.

Before joining makandra I was helping cloud providers in the EMEA region to have their storage backend running lightning fast, highly
available and automatically provisioned. Even before I left school, both Linux and Ruby already were the tools of my choice when it came to
solving problems. Computers being my hobby and making some nice summer jobs possible, it was just natural for me to start a apprenticeship
for IT professional after graduation. Generally speaking, I would always prefer and advocate free software over closed source software, as
long as it does the job well.

How did you first learn about makandra and what drew you to makandra originally?

Given my personal interests it's no surprise that I first learned about makandra at our local hackerspace. When I was looking for a new job
where I wanted to do more Linux during the day, I was very glad to hear from Andi (who occasionally stays at the
OpenLab too) that makandra could use some support with their server operations. The fact that I could also
improve my ruby skills at makandra even put the icing on the cake. :)

What is your role at makandra?

I'm working as an operations engineer, keeping your servers happy and ready.

What are 3 words to describe makandra?

agile

reliable

ambitious

What challenges are you looking forward at makandra?

For now, I'm looking forward getting known to all the fancy projects you host and build on our OpsComplete infrastructure. Usually it's a
lot of fun for me to understand or debug complex computer networks, so I hope I can find some potential for optimizations of our
infrastructure.

Are you messy or organized?

I'm desperately trying to formalize and organize everything but in the end I'm a chaotic nature and love to see how beautiful things emerge
from chaos.

Best vacation you've been to?

Two weeks in Sweden's nature with some colleagues. Next to our holiday home in the forest we had a hot tub, a nice fireplace and a cold
lake but absolutely no mobile internet connection. That was just the perfect setting to relax and experience nature.

Describe what you were like at age 10.

I was an easygoing but always bubbly guy, wondering about a different detail of our wondrous world every day. Often, my parents had to hold
me back when I got a new toy and immediately started taking it into pieces to understand its inner workings.

Do you recall any embarrassing moment at work?

Yes. Once, I showed up at a customers site in Czechia for some weekend maintenance work, but unfortunately "off by one" week. I only
realized it when I gave my customer a call to ask when he would show up and he told me "next week".. I don't want that to ever happen
again. ;-)

If you were an animal what would you be?

A robin, I guess.

People would be surprised if they knew:

I did use Microsoft Windows for a certain challenge, out of free will.

What book did you read last?

Homo Deus, it's worth reading.

Vim or Emacs? (Be careful here…)

:set nocompatible and the party starts.

What tools are you using that you don't want to miss anymore?

Well, I probably couldn't live without my screw gun and my battery powered circular saw anymore. When it comes to software tools, I love my
i3 window manager, taskwarrior, notmuch, vim and zsh running on a debian based distribution.